Improving Zen

22 October 2013 · by Ben Chapman

I’ve spent the last week or so making some small improvements to Zen, some significant and some less so. These have been based on feedback we’ve received from the community and hopefully you guys will like them.

Finding Dojos

The biggest change for users is the ability to search for Dojos by their location on the front page. Using the coordinates provided by Dojos in their Zen profiles we will return the closest Dojo to a user.

Geocoding & Get Coordinates by Map

If your Dojo does not have the correct Coordinates set it will not be found by people searching on the mapping tool mentioned above.

It takes up to 5 minutes after listing coordinates for Dojos to show up on the homepage map. This is due to the caching we have built in.

It used to be quite a task to get the coordinates for Zen from Google maps. I spent a bit of time implementing this:

You can select a location for your Dojo on the map, then click “Get from Map” to use that location. Or use the “Get location from address” feature to geocode the address you entered.

This means you’ll just be able to:

Get a location based on your address at the click of a button (Geocoding)

Fine-tune that location by dragging the marker to get it exactly right

If you have any suggestions on how to make this feature better please email me on [email protected].

Multiple Dojos per User

If you’re crazy you may have more than one Dojo. The original design of Zen meant that you could only have one Dojo, which caused problems for those of you managing one Dojo. The most significant change I’ve made to Zen is to rid the system of this, which means that you can now manage multiple Dojos from one account.

Here you can select the Dojo you want to edit.

If you originally had multiple accounts which you were using to manage Dojos and want to merge these under one account please email me on [email protected] and we can do that for you.

We know some of you also want multiple users to be able to edit your Dojo. We’re much closer to this as a result of these changes, but we need a bit more time to get that feature ready. We hope to have it soon!

Deleting your Dojos

Previously it wasn’t possible to delete a Dojo. Once it was up, that was it. Now you have the option to delete a Dojo from the “My Dojos” menu. It’s worth noting that this doesn’t actually delete your Dojo, but marks it as deleted in our database. Once it’s “deleted” then it won’t be visible publicly, but we can recover the Dojo if it was deleted by accident.

Internal Changes

Finally, some changes were made to the way we verify Dojos. These changes will not be visible directly to end users, but hopefully it’ll make us more efficient at dealing with requests to get Dojos verified.

If you have any changes that you want to suggest, please email [email protected] and we’ll note them down for discussion and future improvements.